Only When I Breathe
by Buffonia
Summary: Tara reflects on the similarities of events, past and present


Title: "Only When I Breathe"  
  
Author: Buffonia  
  
Email: [1]Buffonia@hotmail.com  
  
Rating: PG  
  
Pairing: Willow/Tara  
  
Summary: Tara reflects on the similarity of events, past and present  
  
Spoilers: Takes place after ep Wrecked  
  
Disclaimer: Tara, Willow and all others belong to Joss, Fox and UPN. Not me.  
  
* * *  
  
I'm tired. I'm so tired. I wish I could blame it on the lack of sleep, but that's only the smallest sliver of the problem. It's the lack of Willow. It's the lack of knowing. Knowing what she's doing. What she's wearing. What she's eating for breakfast. It's wondering, not if, but how many times she thinks of me during the long day, during the unbearably cold night.  
  
I want my Willow back.  
  
It's not even the not knowing that hurts the most. The heartbreaker of it all, is what I do know. How if I walk into that house, up those stairs, take a left and open the door, I know what I'll see. The beautiful Willow I fell in love with. But it won't be her inside. It kills me to know, that if I crawl into those familiar arms; the voice, the touch, it's not her.  
  
I can't remember when she stopped being Willow. How could I have let it get this far, why couldn't I see it coming? It was so clear from the beginning. I knew she was powerful, that she had it in her. Like my mother. Just like my mother.  
  
* * *  
  
My mother wasn't a large woman, not big boned. But she had generous curves, birthing hips and was one of the most beautiful things I had ever known. She could hold me in her lap, even on my sixteenth birthday. My last birthday with her. Our final celebration.  
  
But she died when I was seventeen. She was still alive on my seventeenth birthday. If you can call it living.  
  
* * *  
  
In the few lightless hours of sleep that my body manages to tease me with, I dream of her. Obviously. I can see her, shaking in the bed, red strands clinging to her neck and face, the sweat rolling off of her because she's on fire inside. The power trickling out of her pores because it craves escape. Almost as bad as she does.  
  
Lying down can be equally exhausting as running miles. When there's so much movement inside you that your bones scream. Your everything aches. Your body can't be quiet. It's too used to the blood singing and the mind humming. Silence is a dream trembling at the brim of nonexistence.  
  
In my dreams, I'm standing next to her. But I can't touch her. Every time I reach out, her image pulls away. She's so close my fingers ache. I can feel the sun rising and falling, chasing the moon, in my dream time; I watch her slip away.  
  
Like my mother. Just like my mother.  
  
* * *  
  
My mother used to call me Tara Bear. It was hokey, but isn't the beauty of pet names that they make other people wince while your heart melts? Yeah, I was her Tara bear. We would cuddle and gossip and giggle. I had sixteen years of her giggling, coddling and gossiping, sixteen years of being a Tara Bear.  
  
My mother died when I was sixteen. We buried her a year later. Her heart slowed and stopped and her body turned cold when I was seventeen. But she froze over long before then.  
  
It was slow time. A gradual process. Grains of sand slipping through the funnel of an hourglass. So slow, you could hear the granules scratching the glass as they fell away.  
  
But sometimes, looking back, it feels like I stopped being her Tara Bear overnight. Yet I know that it wasn't like that. If someone is choking you, it only takes a moment to miss the oxygen, before your lungs panic, it's sudden.  
  
* * *  
  
Willow is my air. And I'm struggling for my blood to move without her. I'm forcing my eyes closed. The ticks of the clock keeping me company during moonlit hours. I turn on to my side, but I'm empty of the warmth that usually spoons against my shell of an embrace. Flop over onto my stomach. *Willow used to love it when I rubbed her tummy.* I'm a pancake of despair. I fold my limbs, this way and that, over themselves and under my head, I'm an omelet of pain. *What did she have for breakfast this morning?*  
  
Sometimes, I tell myself that we're so connected, that we're doing the same things. If I have a bagel, maybe she is too. Or maybe she's wearing a purple shirt on the day I wear a purple shirt. Subconsciously reading each other's minds. That makes me shiver because I know she can do that not-so-subconsciously.  
  
God, how can my Willow be capable of so much pain?  
  
* * *  
  
My back hurt from sitting up at the kitchen table for hours. She would come in late, from a coven meeting. Excited and bubbly. I would always wait up. I was anxious to hear about the things they did. And she would always have funny stories; someone dropping in a cat's paw instead of a rat's claw or messing up an incantation.  
  
I didn't mind waiting the hours, it was worth it. Except when the hours turned into all night. And then it was apologies and slaps on the wrist, but there were always better stories the next day. Always good reasons, never her fault, she had to fix someone else's mistake and it took all night.  
  
* * *  
  
The morning I woke up on the couch with Dawn; the night no one came home, my legs were stiff and my breath caught in my throat. My body was remembering. It was so similar to waking with the kitchen table pressed into my cheek. The feeling of waking up in something that's not your bed, that's not a bed at all, and feeling like you haven't really slept because part of you has been waiting all night.  
  
The reason I moved out was because I feared night's like those from my teenage years. Of sleeping half awake, of waking up disappointed. Of morning stories that were really just excuses.  
  
Why couldn't I see it until it was right in front of my face? Why did it take so long?  
  
* * *  
  
Stories over coffee and cocoa turned into silence and sleeping all day. My father would make pancakes. He would always ask me, funny shapes or rounds? I liked funny shapes because guessing what they looked like was something to do other than guessing where my mother had been all night. What spells she had done. What stories she wasn't telling me.  
  
And when she finally woke up, it was a groggy woman in my mother's bathrobe. A thin thing, with pointed features and angular limbs where my mother's softness used to be. The goodbyes were muttered if said at all. A flurry of skirt and she was out the door again.  
  
After a while, one wouldn't be crazy if they said too long, I stopped waiting at the kitchen table. You would think I would come to my senses and just wait in the security of my own bed. After all, waiting is waiting. At least then I would wake up disappointed without a crick in my neck or the imprint of a placemat on my face. But instead, I waited outside. On the steps.  
  
I would lean against the porch, craning my neck to the sky and make up constellations. Guessing what stars looked like was something to do other than guessing where my mother was right then. Where she would rather be than at home, cuddled on the couch with me. I couldn't imagine what I'd done to stop being her Tara Bear. I was sixteen, but I was still just a child who wanted her mother back.  
  
Standing in the doorway of her room, I would watch her sleep. I would sacrifice more sleep just to watch her be able to enjoy it. Covered in blankets and curled up to herself. Every time I saw her lay there, it seemed like she hadn't slept in years. I couldn't tell how long I would watch her for, listening to her breathing. She was so close. So close it made my fingers ache.  
  
* * *  
  
My mind hurts from thinking instead of sleeping. The dull whispers echo through my brain. My brain. So confused on who to trust. So many people I have loved have let me down. In a perfect world, love and trust would just pair up together without a second glance. But this world has so many flaws, people are just one of them.  
  
I think some would call me naïve. Falling for someone just like my mother, after how much she hurt me. But I don't think it was naivety that led me to Willow, but maybe that's what made me stay with her after I saw where it was going. I bet part of me thought I could give myself a happy ending this time.  
  
I should have known. That night, at the Bronze, the look in Willow's eyes when she snapped at me. Something deadlier than confidence. Something beyond denial. I don't want to remember it, and I wouldn't be able to, but there are some things that Willow doesn't know about me. I still can't decide which is worse, taking someone's unpleasant memories away or putting false one's in their place.  
  
* * *  
  
She found me crying in my room. Sobbing. Weeping. Shaking uncontrollably. She had been trying to sleep and I woke her up. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. I couldn't keep it in anymore, everything I refused to ask her, tell her, scream at her; it had all liquefied and filled me up inside.  
  
I guess it was too sobering. To see me that upset. I bet she told herself that she was doing it to make her Tara Bear happy. That, for my sake, she would make me remember a mother who cuddled with her every night and, never once, failed to come home.  
  
I'm sure she thought she was doing the right thing, because it hurt her to see me so damn unhappy. I know she saw me more than just a buzzkill, but part of me realizes that that is all I really was to her right then.  
  
Willow and my mother don't understand something about memories. Their spells were not merely illusions to turn my frown upside down. Memories are what we are. Learning from our mistakes, reasoning based on past experiences. It's how babies progress from infanthood. Memories are living, breathing things. Dawn knows how true that is, Dawn is proof of how true that is.  
  
* * *  
  
When someone has one thing on their mind, when the power takes over, they usually become careless in other areas. My mother certainly did. Every morning after the day she found me crying, when I woke up in my bed, I would make pancakes for her. Because "Mom was sick" with the flu or a cold; why else would she sleep all day?  
  
As she got worse, she got sloppy. She forgot to do the spell one day and I couldn't figure out why she didn't come home that night. I was panicked. This was the hourglass shattering. I woke up my dad and begged him to call the police, because something terrible must have happened to her. He looked at me strangely for a moment before asking how I wasn't used to this by now. I froze. I don't know what I mumbled to him to excuse my behavior and it doesn't matter.  
  
What matters was the mental paralysis that overcame me as I reversed my mother's spell. The nausea that it invoked when the horrible memories flooded back. The simultaneous betrayal, disappointment, anger and grief. To have that morning-after-sleeping-with-my-head-on-a-goddamned-kitchen-table feeling, tenfold, and as if for the first time.  
  
Then imagine it happens again, but this time not by your now dead mother but by your lover. And it drags up everything you felt before, and then some.  
  
* * *  
  
Dawn's arm is almost fully healed and she doesn't have to wear the sling anymore. But it's still too sore and weak to lift above her shoulder. She says it's really annoying, only being able to brush her hair with one hand, and cracks jokes about looking like she's from one of those commercials where she's dared to try a product on half of her head. I laugh with her, but it kills me.  
  
Dawn says that Willow cries out a lot in her sleep. Whimpering noises mostly, but sometimes words. Once she heard Willow cry my name and ask me if I missed her. I don't know what answer Will heard, in whatever dream she was having, but I think about that a lot. And about what I would say.  
  
It's a stupid question really, there's only one answer. God, how much I miss you Willow. I miss you with every breath. I inhale how you used to tickle me if you woke up first, I exhale the way one corner of your mouth would always beat the other side to a smile. Yes, I miss you Willow. But only when I breathe.  
  
~END~  
  
* * *  
  
My BtVS fanfic site: http://www.angelfire.com/ego/buffdom  
  
References  
  
1. mailto:Buffonia@hotmail.com 


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